Dreamcasts: Play at Low Volume

halfunusual

1 minute ago

3 min read

I’ve been making some sleepcasts.

That sentence sounds fairly straightforward. There are, after all, an awful lot of sleepcasts on the internet.

But these aren’t quite what I expected them to be.

The first one began with an idea about making a kind of dream story: something with enough narrative to give the mind somewhere to wander, but without demanding that it actually follow the story. A voice, some sound, some slowly moving images, and a story that gradually becomes less interested in where it’s going.

That became [Dreamcast 1: The Lighthouse in the Hallway].

Then came [Dreamcast 2: The World Without You], [Dreamcast 3: The Room Beneath the Lake], and now [Dreamcast 4: The Inn at the End of the Road].

Four different ways into the same general territory.

And then, rather unexpectedly, I discovered something important.

Turn it down.

I’d been listening to them myself, partly to check the finished pieces, partly because you can’t really make something intended for sleep without eventually becoming your own guinea pig.

At normal listening volume, there is quite a lot going on.

There’s a voice telling you a story. There are sounds underneath it. There are atmospheric textures. There are images moving slowly on the screen. All of those things are competing, to some degree, for the same little bit of attention.

But turn the volume down.

Quite a lot.

And something changes.

The voice stops being something you’re actively listening to. It becomes something that is simply there. The sound underneath it occupies a little corner of the room. The words arrive and disappear. You don’t have to catch every sentence.

And somehow the whole thing makes more sense.

The ingredients seem to fall into the right proportions.

The story is still there, but it doesn’t need to be followed. The sound is still there, but it doesn’t need to be heard in detail. Even the images can become something that happens somewhere beyond the edge of attention.

Nothing has actually disappeared.

It’s just that nothing is demanding to be noticed.

And perhaps that is what I was trying to make without quite knowing it.

Nothing to do

There’s something slightly contradictory about making something designed to help somebody sleep.

You can give people instructions for breathing. You can tell them to relax their shoulders, release their jaw, notice their body, focus their attention, count backwards…

But now you’ve given them a job.

And sleep is rather bad at jobs.

So the Dreamcasts don’t really ask you to do anything.

You don’t have to follow the story.

You don’t have to concentrate on the voice.

You don’t have to watch the pictures.

You don’t even have to stay awake long enough to find out what happens.

In fact, if you miss half of it, I think that’s probably evidence that it’s working rather nicely.

Four different doors

The four Dreamcasts have ended up taking slightly different routes.

[The Lighthouse in the Hallway] is the longest and strangest of them — a story that gradually loosens its grip on being a story.

[The World Without You] is shorter and more wandering, moving through a world that doesn’t quite behave as expected.

[The Room Beneath the Lake] is quieter and more traditionally restful.

And [The Inn at the End of the Road] is, perhaps, the most straightforward sleep story: a road, an inn, a room, a few clocks that don’t quite agree with each other, and the feeling that somewhere you have been before is waiting for you.

They are different, but they share the same principle.

Don’t make the listener work.